Whose Story Is This, Anyway? Identification with Clients in Leadership Coaching

Abstract

IT IS ALMOST INEVITABLE THAT, as leadership coaches, we will encounter clients with situations and issues apparently similar to our own. These similarities may intrigue and stimulate us, or they may feel disquieting and uncomfortable.

My client Robert is a middle manager who is having trouble stepping up to the next level of leadership. After six weeks of coaching, it feels like we are closing in on his key issues: his ambition and his flight from ambition, his abundance of choices and his fear of committing to a single game plan, his sense of an inherent conflict between his career and his family life.

Then it hits me—this is just what is showing up in my life. This guy is me!

I’m excited because I know these issues, and I can be of help. But from somewhere inside comes a warning, “You haven’t been paying enough attention to these issues for yourself. How can you expect to coach Robert? And whose story is this, anyway?”